DEV1AT3 by Jay Kristoff – ARC Review

My Rating ~ Five stars

RELEASE DATE: 17 June 2019

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Format: Paperback

Pages: 448

RRP: AU$19.99

Blurb

Lemon Fresh has seen better days.

After the climactic battle in Babel, she finds herself separated from Ezekiel and Cricket in the wastelands. Lemon’s abilities to manipulate electricity mark her as a deviate, and deadly corporate operatives are hunting her to use as a weapon in the war between BioMaas Incorporated and Daedelus Technologies. Instead, Lemon finds herself falling in with a group of fellow deviates—a band of teenagers with astonishing abilities, led by an enigmatic figure known as the Major, who may hold the secrets to Lemon’s past.

Meanwhile, Cricket finds himself in possession of the puritanical Brotherhood, a religious cult set for a head-on collision with the Major and his band. Searching for Lemon, Ezekiel finds a strange ally in an old enemy, and uncovers a plot that may see him reunited with his beloved Ana.

And inside Babel, a remade Eve hatches a plan to bring an end to the world

Review

Thank you so much to Allen & Unwin for providing me with a copy of DEV1AT3 in exchange for an honest review.

***As this review is for book 2 in the series, there will be spoilers for the first book, LIFEL1K3 in this review!***

LIFEL1K3 was one of my absolute favourite books last year and I opened DEV1AT3 with the sort of reverence and fear that comes from hoping a sequel will live up to the first book. I should have known there was no way Jay Kristoff would ever let me down!

My favourite LIFEL1K3 characters were by far Lemon Fresh and Cricket (and Kaiser, but we won’t talk about that Mr Kristoff *salty look*) so getting a whole book where they featured as main characters….I cry with happiness. Chapters were divided between Lemon, Cricket and Ezekiel’s point of view and it worked really well.

DEV1AT3 picks up where LIFEL1K3 left off, but we follow Lemon, Cricket and Ezekiel as they are forced to flee and leave Eve behind. When Cricket’s batteries die, Ezekiel heads back to Babel to retrieve some more and all three of them become separated. As Cricket tries to work out how to escape the vicious Brotherhood, while not frying his chips from breaking the laws of robotics, Lemon comes across a band of deviates who shares something in common with her. With Ezekiel teaming up with an unlikely ally, the race to find Ana, and save the world from the Lifelike’s plans, is no easy task.

I LIVE for the banter and slang in these books. It’s a Kristoff specialty to able to make you laugh out loud one minute and have you handing him your broken heart on a platter the next. The action was non-stop and the plot twists attack from all sides. I now have even more favourite characters in this series (Grimm has at least half of my heart). If you thought LIFEL1K3 finished on a cliffhanger, well, you’re in for a ride with DEV1AT3 😁